2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe first editions are documented on this shelf, from Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) (1774) to Faust. Eine Tragödie (Part One) (1808) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe title from later printings and book-club copies — the publisher and year to expect, the number-line or edition-statement conventions, and the tells that show up in online listings.
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- Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) — 1774 · Weygandsche BuchhandlungPublished anonymously at Leipzig for the autumn 1774 book fair: two parts in one volume, 224 pages, small 8vo (approx. 16.5 x 10 cm), with an engraved title vignette associated with Adam Friedrich Oeser. The decisive test is the final page (p. 224): the first printing carries the errata list (Druckfehlerverzeichnis), which the second printing replaces with a woodcut vignette — described by German dealers as a…. The Leipzig 1774 German original is the true first; everything else is a translation or a later authorial revision. The title itself is a precedence point: the 1774 first edition reads 'Die Leiden des jungen Werthers' with the genitive -s, while Goethe's substantially revised second version (Göschen, Leipzig, 1787) drops it to 'Leiden des jungen Werther' and is a different text, not a reprint. The first edition…. No book-club issues exist for this title. Weygand's authorised second edition ('Zweyte ächte Auflage', Leipzig, 1775) followed, and unauthorised reprints appeared quickly — among them Christian Friedrich Himburg's Berlin piracy of 1779, which already carries alterations to the authorised 1774/75 text. A Weygand-style Leipzig imprint therefore proves nothing on its own: apply the errata-versus-vignette test at p.….
- Faust. Eine Tragödie (Part One) — 1808 · J.G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, TübingenThe census claim needs correcting on precedence within 1808. The first printing of the completed Part One is the one inside Goethe's Werke, Achter Band (Tübingen: Cotta, 1808): the scholarly Historisch-kritische Faustedition assigns that printing the siglum A and states that the separately published editions derive from the printings within the collected editions, D.1 (1808) going back to A. German antiquarian…. A German original; the precedence question is internal to Cotta's 1808 output rather than UK-versus-US. 'Faust. Ein Fragment' (Leipzig: bey Georg Joachim Göschen, 1790) precedes it and is separately collected as the first published version of Faust: small 8vo (157 x 95 mm), [2], 168 pp., half-title signed A, with the first issue identified by the three repeated lines at the foot of p. 144 and the head of p. 145…. No book-club issues exist for this title. The live trap here is the inverse of the usual one: the separate 1808 volume looks like the first edition and is routinely offered as such, when the first printing sits inside Werke, Achter Band of the same year and the same Cotta Tübingen imprint. Later Cotta collections — including the Ausgabe letzter Hand (1827-1830) — reprint Part One within multi-volume sets and are….
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